About 92.8 percent of passengers who departed at Shanghai Pudong Airport said they were satisfied with the airport's new Terminal 2 while 94.4 percent of arriving or in transit also agreed.

Terminal 2 handled 2,822 flights and 328,000 passengers between March 26, the day it opened, and April 22.

The number of check-in passengers will increase 20 percent at Terminal 2 after tomorrow as 18 airline service centers move operations there, according to airport immigration police.

The Pudong airport is the first in the country with three runways. It will be able to handle a total of 60 landings and takeoffs per hour during peak periods.

The second terminal and the third runway are expected to boost the annual capacity of the city's bigger airport to 60 million passengers and 4.2 million tons of freight, according to previous reports.

The airport, the world's sixth busiest in terms of capacity, handled 253,671 takeoffs and landings last year.

It is the only airport in the world where courier companies UPS and DHL each have a base. It ranked fifth globally for cargo and mail volume in the first three quarters of last year.

Airport authorities in Shanghai also plan to build a third passenger terminal and two more runways by 2015 to meet rising air travel demand, Wu Nianzu, chairman of Shanghai Airport Authority, said in previous reports.

(Shanghai Daily April 28, 2008)